I just found some good advice in the New York Times. It’s contained in a little essay by Joyce Wadler, who’s surprisingly droll considering that her literary output includes two memoirs of bouts with cancer. Wadler writes a column, addressed to boom generation readers, called I Was Misinformed, and her November 9 installment has to do with getting to a certain age and realizing you have things hidden in the back of your sock drawer that you don’t want your survivors finding after you’re gone.
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Horrible indeed. If only there’d been somebody like Wadler around to provide a little guidance when old Ray Lafayette was getting ready to shuffle off this mortal coil. The dead patriarch of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate didn’t leave any incriminating billets-doux, but the dirty little secrets his children and grandkids do uncover while clearing out his house are enough to trigger nearly two and a half hours of amusing hysterics.
But there are no quotations from T.S. Eliot in Appropriate, and nothing like the mad poetry Letts’s Violet spouts as she pops another pill and rattles around her messy old manse, where the windows have been boarded up as if she’d already died and left it abandoned.
Stef Tovar, on the other hand, finds an anguish in Frank that endears him against all expectation. As River, Leah Karpel finds an engaging combination of the touchy-feely and the tough. And Kirsten Fitzgerald is just plain overwhelming as Toni, using her formidable body to intimidate all comers even as she makes Toni’s own bitterness clear. A fascinating coup de theatre ends the play, but it’s no more a coup than Fitzgerald is.
